In his unhappy journey, he was witness to thousands of statues and engravings of Cleopatra being smashed and then covered over with stone. They were all being destroyed, all but the few the emperor had sanctioned.
The workers who were laboring over those images reported strange requests from the conquerors. The emperor had ordered completion on a temple the queen had begun, the outside of which was decorated with a depiction of Cleopatra and her son Caesarion making an offering to Isis.
The temple and its decoration were traditional, the boy depicted with a miniaturized version of himself traveling behind him. The souls of royalty were always portrayed this way.
The depiction of Caesarion was traditional, but that of the queen was not.
At the temple of Dendera, Octavian had ordered that the queen be depicted unaccompanied by her ka, her soul.
Most imagined it to be an act of libel, a mockery of the woman Rome had conquered. Cleopatra, robbed symbolically of her soul, no longer royal. It was an elegant metaphoric insult.
Nicolaus the Damascene suspected otherwise.
What did Octavian know?
When, at long last, he arrived at an open port, he was so desperate to get out of Egypt that he leapt aboard the first vessel he saw, Persephone, a Greek transport full of slaves and animals, destined, he assumed, for Athens. He bought his passage with coins marked in the queen’s image, paying more than he’d expected.
“Those are being melted down now,” the captain told him. It had been nearly two months since the queen’s death. The coins were the easiest portraits to obliterate, stirred into a slurry of metal and then recast. The new ones had Octavian and his general, Marcus Agrippa, on the front. The reverse was marked with a chained crocodile.
“Then have them all,” the scholar said. “They are of no use to me.”
They’d been at sea for a week before it occurred to Nicolaus to ask what exactly their destination was.
“We travel to Rome. The animals are to celebrate the emperor’s triumph over Egypt.”
Nicolaus would have laughed had it not been so idiotic. Of course. He’d placed himself aboard a ship sailing into the arms of those who hunted him.
Now he stood aboard this ship of animals, watching the vessel breach the waves and wondering if, despite all his fleeing, despite all his planning, his end was coming. He’d seen things as the ship tilted, visions in the green depths, and none of them were bright. Sharks, with their dull, gray eyes, and more. Tentacled things, nothing beautiful. None of the sirens of the great epics. He thought for a moment of his idol, Homer, who had simply lived a poet and died a poet. He had not been a fool, as Nicolaus had. He hadn’t trafficked in magic he didn’t understand.
Nicolaus sighed and rubbed at his eyes. He could have disappeared into the desert or returned to the court of King Herod, from whence he’d come.
Instead—
The Fates had arranged things differently. He was following her to Italy, however against his will. She’d pursue her enemy and her remaining children. He had no doubt that if she lived, that was where she was headed.
Nicolaus ran his fingers through his long hair, tugging at it in an attempt to galvanize his mind and keep himself awake. Here he sat, on a rocking ship, on a tossing sea, helpless to stop the thing he’d unleashed. Somewhere in the depths of his knowledge, surely there was a solution. Somewhere, there was the right story, a story of triumph, of mortals conquering the gods. Years of reading, years of learning, and yet he couldn’t think of what he should have done.
Suddenly, he sat up straight, listening.
From somewhere below, he heard it again. A wailing cry. A moan. A scream.
Somewhere, deep below him, someone was dying.
3
The chieftain of the Psylli tribe watched the sand rising on the horizon as he milked the last droplets of venom from his viper’s fangs. He coiled his serpents into their traveling basket.
“Hush,” he told them, looking into their bright, arrowhead faces. “Sleep, sweet ones.”
Usem was already painted for his employment, his ebony skin smeared with reddish pigments and precious violet inks. His ceremonial headdress was in place, and his coral ornaments. There was no point in trying to avoid the Romans. The nomadic tribe was regularly employed by them, for matters relating both to poisoning enemies and to healing those who had been poisoned. Usem himself had been drawn into Roman service only three months before, brought to Alexandria to attend the dead queen Cleopatra. Though Usem tried, his fingers on her heart, his lips on her wound, he was not able to resurrect her.
It was not snake venom that had killed her, he knew that even then, though he could not determine why she lay so still, a shining thing in her shining room. She didn’t seem entirely dead, or if she was, it was a kind of dead he’d never encountered before.
Something was terribly wrong. Usem had tried to tell the man who was now their emperor, but the Romans had ignored him, and eventually, he’d given in, taken their payment and departed.
Upon his return from Alexandria, Usem had consulted the wind, who went everywhere and saw everything. Now he understood. A dark goddess had risen, one of the Old Ones, and Cleopatra was her earthly vessel.
The forces of chaos were stirring.
All across Africa, serpents seethed from their nests, and lions padded through villages. Elephants stampeded. One of Usem’s own tribesmen had seen the queen walking down a dusty road in the South. The man reported that the very air shook with her power. She killed several villagers before moving on, and nomads picked up the bodies on the roadside, shriveled and pale, bloodless.
The signs had ceased a few days before, but Usem was not foolish enough to imagine that this meant peace. The queen might have left Africa, but it did not matter. Where she went, the world shifted, and what she did was enough to disrupt the balance. The rising of such a force was to no one’s benefit.
The seas tossed, higher and higher. Angry waves crashed upon the walls of Alexandria, and strange beasts were washed up from the depths.
Though it was the Romans who enraged her, the violence of such a creature would not be confined to her enemies. Still, Usem was not afraid. His people were warriors by nature. And there were things to be gained in this fight. More than gold, though this was the usual form of payment for a Psylli’s services. No. This fight was a matter of life and death, and Usem sought to use this to his advantage. The Romans were desperate. He would drive a harder bargain. If they wished to employ a Psylli to battle with an immortal, it would cost them more than they were accustomed to paying.
Usem, as it happened, had a price in mind.
He looked about him, at the smooth desert, at his camels, at his home. His children, three daughters and three sons, huddled in the tent, and their grandmother stretched her arms to encompass them.
Usem threw the leopard skin over his shoulder as the soldiers rode up to his camp. It represented the starry night sky, and his possession of such a thing would show his power to those who sought to use it.
“I will ride with you against your enemy,” he told their leader, his words precise.
“You have no choice,” said the centurion, looming over him. The fact that the legionaries were mounted meant that speed was required. Otherwise, it would have been a march. “It is the will of the emperor that you come.”
The Psylli laughed, a dry rattle of mirth that shook his ornaments and caused the sand around him to rise into a small tornado. The winds were his dear ones, and he called them to stand with him.
Out along the horizon, the sky grew black and whirling, the shapes of great and horned beasts forming in the dust. Their eyes flashed heat lightning as they began to move toward the interlopers.
The soldiers drew back from this spectacle, quaking and disbelieving, just as Usem intended them to be.
“There is always a choice,” said the Psylli, as he leapt atop the horse, kicking his bare heels into its sides. “I have made mine. We ride to war.”
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4
The scream was repeated, high, desperate, desolate, and then there was a deep, rattling roar. Nicolaus ran onto the deck, where the sailors were surging about in panic, swearing.
“If the lions are loose,” one said, “I’m going up the mast.”
“They can climb,” said another. “Didn’t you see them draped over the trees? We’d be better off jumping into the water.”
They looked over the rail at the dark, finned shape still accompanying them. More had joined the first, and now the vessel was trailed by a shifting underwater cloud of predators. The captain, a stout, weatherworn man with a lifetime’s worth of steel-gray tattoos on his shoulders, looked down at the sharks, spat, drew his sword, and attempted to instill order.
“If the lions are loose,” he said, “we’ll kill them or we’ll cage them back up. Nothing to be afraid of, boys.”
Another roar, followed by screaming.
Screaming.
Screaming.
And silence. Which lasted much too long.
The swallows launched themselves off the rigging. The moon slid across the sky, and the sun crept about under the horizon, its bright fingers grasping at the edge of the sea. Still, the crew stayed on deck.
No one wanted to be the first to investigate what had transpired below.
“The lions sleep,” said the captain, though he was not entirely convinced of this. There had been something about that roar that had stayed in the pit of his stomach. “The lions have eaten, and now they sleep.”
No one moved. The gladiatorial slaves were an expensive cargo, if nothing else. No one wanted to go below and discover carnage. Least of all, if the creatures that had created it were still hiding there, hungering.
“I’ll go,” said the lone passenger just as dawn broke.
The sailors looked at him.
He was mad, clearly. The passenger talked in his sleep, swinging fretfully in his hammock, and he spoke in languages the sailors had never heard before.
Still, he was not one of them, and so they were willing to let him go to his death.
“How many lions are below?” Nicolaus asked, standing over the locked hatch that led to the animal’s hold.
“Six,” said the captain.
“If one is loose, then they all are?”
“Exactly.”
The captain had armed himself with aconite-smeared arrows. He passed Nicolaus a sword and shield, and then the sailors stood in formations, waiting for the lions to be chased up onto the deck.
Nicolaus eased himself down the ladder, at each rung expecting hot breath on his back. His lantern was not bright enough to illuminate the darkness to his satisfaction. He might only travel in a small circle of light, and beyond the edge of it was something horrible.
What was he doing, climbing down a ladder into a dark and haunted hold?
He was as good as dead anyway, a wanted man traveling to Rome.
He could hear breathing, there, in the far darkness. He held the lantern out in front of him, the sword in his other hand overmatched by trembling.
A lion, tawny, amber-eyed, enormous, stretched on the floor, his mane streaked in gore. The beast regarded Nicolaus calmly for a moment, and then, just as casually, lifted his lip and bared his long teeth. The historian felt his bowels liquefy. There were bars between them, though. This lion had not escaped.
There was a sound behind him. The sound of air displaced in a silent leap.
Nicolaus whirled, the lantern swinging, catching a glimpse of golden fur before it disappeared into the shadows. He smelled the silk of the creature, the sleek fur, the musk.
He turned his head slowly, counting them. There were six lions in the cage.
But there had been seven lions in the room.
He suddenly heard the muffled sobbing of a woman. Nicolaus walked cautiously toward the door that led to the slave quarters. His lantern went out as he entered the room, and then he could see nothing at all. His other senses compensated, attempting to draw understanding from invisibility.
The pungent, smothering smell of bodies kept too close, sweat and salt, feces and blood.
The dripping heat, radiating from the walls and floor.
The sound of sobbing. Only one voice. A female voice.
He could see light coming in from somewhere, a fissure in the side of the ship. He walked toward it, stepping carefully, his feet slipping on something he chose not to think about.
He could not find her at first. The ground was covered in straw and—
His feet nudged against solid objects, strangely frail. His eyes began to adjust, and he recoiled.
Bodies.
The sobbing continued, softer now.
Nicolaus pressed his hand over his mouth, swallowing bile. The lion had killed all the slaves. All but one, and here she was, crying in the darkness. Every nerve in the historian screamed for his departure, demanding that he bolt up the ladder and into the light.
But where was the beast?
Something moved quickly in front of him in the dim light, a form barely visible and impossible to define. He pressed his sword out before him, slicing the air. Nothing there.
“You will not be able to kill me that way,” someone whispered from close behind him. He felt breath on his ear.
He whirled, the blade cutting through the place the sound had come from. His shoulders clenched. His heart pounded, and he suddenly realized that—
He knew the voice.
It was ravaged, changed from the silvery thing it had been, but he knew it. He’d listened to her tell tales, listened to her sing, listened to her call to her children. He’d listened to her spell chanting, teaching her the pronunciation of the words.
“Shall I kill you, too?” the voice asked him, and then there was another choked sound of pure misery. “I cannot stop myself. Leave me if you want to live.”
He moved toward her. There she was, curled in a coil of rope.
“How can you be here?” he managed to ask. An inadequate question.
She looked up at him, and he saw, in the dim light, her eyes glittering, her expression weary. Her face was streaked with misery, her mouth with blood.
“You do not know me,” she said. “I am nothing that lives in light.”
What had his life become? Here he was, on a slave ship in the middle of the sea, with the creature who had been the queen of Egypt.
“Queen Cleopatra, I am Nicolaus of Damascus. I was tutor to your children,” Nicolaus said. He could not lift his voice above a whisper. “I know you.”
She made a sound that was a cross between laughter and sobbing.
“Knew,” she replied. “You knew me. You know me no longer.”
She lifted her hand toward him. Her long limbs, her delicate fingers, all of it smeared with red. She cradled something covered in cloth.
“What have you done?” he asked, his voice strangely high and sharp. He was near to swooning, and yet anger tripped up from within him, triumphing over fear. “There were a hundred slaves aboard this ship.”
“Did you think they were people?” she asked. She raised her chin, and there was a trace of the old pride. “They were not treated as people. They were animals on this vessel. The Romans feed them the same food they feed the lions. Less food. I was a queen, and now I am a lion. I was a lion and now I am a slave. I was a slave, and now I am a beast. As a beast, I hunger. Should I not be fed?”
“Where are the rest?” Nicolaus asked.
Cleopatra moved her hand to indicate the hole in the ship’s side. There was, Nicolaus noticed now, a shred of fabric clinging to the splintered wood.
The sharks. Nicolaus understood it suddenly, the mass of silver flesh tracing the route of the vessel.
“If you knew me once, then help me now,” she said.
Nicolaus stepped back. He did not want what she had to give him.
Cleopatra pulled the cloth in her arms aside and revealed the face of a small boy, perhaps four years old. Ashen che
eks, dark, knotted hair.
The child’s eyes opened and he looked at Nicolaus, terrified. The historian snatched him from Cleopatra. The boy was unwounded.
“This was his mother.” She touched a corpse with her fingertips. “My hands were on him, when I realized.”
She opened her fists and revealed long scores in the flesh.
The grief on the monster’s face crippled Nicolaus with guilt. She was not wholly a monster. He could see the Cleopatra he had known, still inside.
“I would not kill a child. You must believe me. She takes my body, and she hungers. I thought I was strong enough to resist her.”
The historian wrestled with his soul. He’d helped to do this. She was here because of him.
Sekhmet cared nothing for gold, nothing for gems. All she desired was blood. Once she began to kill, she could not stop. That was her nature. Cleopatra had killed not of her own volition but because he’d translated that spell, translated it badly, and summoned the goddess with no protections for the summoner.
Had he not, the queen would have been dead and buried these months. Had he not, Nicolaus would never have found himself aboard this vessel, hunted by Romans, a criminal.
“What do you want from me?” he asked.
“My children are in Rome with the emperor. Help me find them. He killed my husband. He killed my son. He killed me.”
“And yet you live.”
“Then you do not know what the living are.”
She grabbed Nicolaus’s hand and placed it on her breast. He tried to pull away from her, but she held him there until he felt the absence of her heartbeat.
“I will help you,” he managed.
5
Auðr was kneeling beside a bed deep in the northern forest, when she heard the legionaries approaching. The girl she was tending gasped, her swollen belly bluish and rigid, the pallet beneath her soaked with blood, and Auðr hissed in frustration. The horses outside were distracting, and she needed all her powers for this. Her arms trembled with tension. Too much time had passed.